Tuesday, 23 April 2013

How Does the Subaltern Speak?

Postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of
Enlightenment universalism at its own peril.

In recent decades, postcolonial theory has largely displaced
Marxism as the dominant perspective among intellectuals engaged in the project
of critically examining the relationship between the Western and non-Western
worlds. Originating in the humanities, postcolonial theory has subse­quently
become increasingly influential in history, anthropology, and the social
sciences. Its rejection of the universalisms and meta-narratives associated
with Enlightenment thought dovetailed with the broader turn of the intellectual
left during the 1980s and 1990s.

Vivek Chibber’s new book, Postcolonial Theory and the
Specter of Capital, represents a wide-ranging challenge to many of the core
tenets of postcolonial theory. Focusing particularly on the strain of
postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies, Chibber makes a strong case for
why we can — and must — conceptualize the non-Western world through the same
analytical lens that we use to understand developments in the West. He offers a
sustained defense of theoretical approaches that emphasize universal categories
like capitalism and class. His work constitutes an argument for the continued
relevance of Marxism in the face of some of its most trenchant critics.

Chibber was interviewed for Jacobin by Jonah Birch, a
graduate student in sociology at New York University.

Jonah Birch: At the core of postcolonial theory is the
notion that Western categories can’t be applied to postcolonial societies like
India. On what basis is this claim made?

Vivek Chibber: This is probably the single most important
argument coming out of postcolonial studies, and this is also what makes it so
important to engage them. There has been no really prominent body of thought
associated with the Left in the last hundred and fifty years or so that has
insisted on denying the scientific ethos and the applicability of categories
coming out of the liberal enlightenment and the radical enlightenment —
categories like capital, democracy, liberalism, rationality, and objectivity.
There have been philosophers who have criticized these orientations, but
they’ve rarely achieved any significant traction on the Left. Postcolonial
theorists are the first to do so.

The argument really comes out of a background sociological
assumption: for the categories of political economy and the Enlightenment to
have any purchase, capitalism must spread across the world. This is called the
“universalization of capital.”

The argument goes like this: the universalizing categories
associated with Enlightenment thought are only as legitimate as the universalizing
tendency of capital. And postcolonial theorists deny that capital has in fact
universalized — or more importantly, that it ever could universalize around the
globe. Since capitalism has not and cannot universalize, the categories that
people like Marx developed for understanding capitalism also cannot be
universalized.

What this means for postcolonial theory is that the parts of
the globe where the universalization of capital has failed need to generate
their own local categories. And more importantly, it means that theories like
Marxism, which try to utilize the categories of political economy, are not only
wrong, but they’re Eurocentric, and not only Eurocentric, but they’re part of
the colonial and imperial drive of the West. And so they’re implicated in
imperialism. Again, this is a pretty novel argument on the Left.

JB: What made you decide to focus on subaltern studies as a
way of critiquing postcolonial theory more generally?

VC: Postcolonial theory is a very diffuse body of ideas. It
really comes out of literary and cultural studies, and had its initial
influence there. It then spread out through area studies, history, and
anthropology. It spread into those fields because of the influence of culture
and cultural theory from the 1980s onwards. So, by the late 1980s and early
1990s, disciplines such as history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and
South Asian studies were infused with a heavy turn toward what we now know as
postcolonial theory.

To engage the theory, you run up against a basic problem:
because it’s so diffuse, it’s hard to pin down what its core propositions are,
so first of all, it’s hard to know exactly what to criticize. Also, its
defenders are able to easily rebut any criticisms by pointing to other aspects
that you might have missed in the theory, saying that you’ve honed in on the
wrong aspects. Because of this, I had to find some core components of the
theory — some stream of theorizing inside postcolonial studies — that is
consistent, coherent, and highly influential.

I also wanted to focus on those dimensions of the theory
centered on history, historical development, and social structures, and not the
literary criticism. Subaltern studies fits all of these molds: it’s been
extremely influential in area studies; it’s fairly internally consistent, and
it focuses on history and social structure. As a strand of theorizing, it’s
been highly influential partly because of this internal consistency, but also
partly because its main proponents come out of a Marxist background and they
were all based in India or parts of the Third World. This gave them a great
deal of legitimacy and credibility, both as critics of Marxism and as exponents
of a new way of understanding the Global South. It’s through the work of the
Subalternists that these notions about capital’s failed universalization and
the need for indigenous categories have become respectable.

JB: Why is it, according to the subaltern studies theorists,
that capitalism’s universalizing tendencies broke down in the postcolonial
world? What is it about these societies that impeded capitalism’s progress?

VC: Subaltern studies offers two distinct arguments for how
and why the universalizing drive of capital was blocked. One argument comes
from Ranajit Guha. Guha located the universalizing drive of capital in the
ability of a particular agent — namely, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class —
to overthrow the feudal order and construct a coalition of classes that
includes not only capitalists and merchants, but also workers and peasants. And
through the alliance that is cobbled together, capital is supposed to erect a
new political order, which is not only pro-capitalist in terms of defending the
property rights of capitalists, but also a liberal, encompassing, and
consensual order.

So for the universalizing drive of capital to be real, Guha
says, it must be experienced as the emergence of a capitalist class that
constructs a consensual, liberal order. This order replaces the ancien régime,
and is universalizing in that it expresses the interests of capitalists as
universal interests. Capital, as Guha says, achieves the ability to speak for
all of society: it is not only dominant as a class, but also hegemonic in that
it doesn’t need to use coercion to maintain its power.

So Guha locates the universalizing drive in the construction
of an encompassing political culture. The key point for Guha is that the
bourgeoisie in the West was able to achieve such an order while the bourgeoisie
in the East failed to do so. Instead of overthrowing feudalism, it made some
sort of compact with the feudal classes; instead of becoming a hegemonic force
with a broad, cross-class coalition, it tried its best to suppress the
involvement of peasants and the working class. Instead of erecting a consensual
and encompassing political order, it put into place highly unstable and fairly
authoritarian political orders. It maintained the rift between the class
culture of the subaltern and that of the elite.

So for Guha, whereas in the West the bourgeoisie was able to
speak for all the various classes, in the East it failed in this goal, making
it dominant but not hegemonic. This in turn makes modernity in the two parts of
the world fundamentally different by generating very different political
dynamics in the East and West, and this is the significance of capital’s
universalizing drive having failed.

JB: So their argument rests on a claim about the role of the
bourgeoisie in the West, and the failure of its counterpart in postcolonial
societies?

VC: For Guha, absolutely, and the subaltern studies group
accepts these arguments, largely without qualification. They describe the
situation — the condition of the East — as a condition in which the bourgeoisie
dominates but lacks hegemony, whereas the West has both dominance and hegemony.

Now the problem with this is, as you said, that the core of
the argument is a certain description of the achievements of the Western
bourgeoisie. The argument, unfortunately, has very little historical purchase.
There was a time, in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, even
into the 1950s, when many historians accepted this picture of the rise of the
bourgeoisie in the West. Over the last thirty or forty years, though, it has
been largely rejected, even among Marxists.

What’s strange is that Guha’s book and his articles were
written as though the criticisms of this approach were never made. And what’s
even stranger is that the historical profession — within which subaltern
studies has been so influential — has never questioned this foundation of the
subaltern studies project, even though they all announce that it’s the
foundation. The bourgeoisie in the West never strove for the goals that Guha
ascribes to it: it never tried to bring about a consensual political culture or
represent working-class interests. In fact, it fought tooth and nail against
them for centuries after the so-called bourgeois revolutions. When those
freedoms were finally achieved, it was through very intense struggle by the
dispossessed, waged against the heroes of Guha’s narrative, the bourgeoisie. So
the irony is that Guha really works with an incredibly naïve, even ideological
notion of the Western experience. He doesn’t see that capitalists have
everywhere and always been hostile to the extension of political rights to
working people.

JB: Okay, so that’s one argument about the radical
specificity of the colonial and postcolonial worlds. But you said before that
there’s another one?

VC: Yeah, the second argument comes primarily in Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s work. His doubts about the universalization of capital are quite
distinct from Guha’s. Guha locates capital’s universalizing tendency in a
particular agent: the bourgeoisie. Chakrabarty locates it in capitalism’s
ability to transform all social relations wherever it goes. And he concludes
that it fails this test because he finds that there are various cultural,
social, and political practices in the East that don’t conform to his model of
what a capitalist culture and political system should look like.

So, in his view, the test for a successful universalization
of capital is that all social practices must be immersed in the logic of
capital. He never clearly specifies what the logic of capital is, but there are
some broad parameters that he has in mind.

JB: That strikes me as a pretty high bar.

VC: Yeah, that’s the point; the bar is an impossible one. So
if you find in India that marriage practices still use ancient rituals; if you
find in Africa that people still tend to pray while they’re at work — those
kinds of practices make for a failure of capital’s universalization.

What I say in the book is that this is kind of bizarre: all
capital’s universalization requires is that the economic logic of capitalism be
implanted in various parts of the world and that it be successfully reproduced
over time. This will, of course, generate a certain degree of cultural and
political change as well. However, it doesn’t require that all, or even most,
of the cultural practices of a region be transformed along some kind of
identifiable capitalist lines.

JB: This is the theoretical argument you make in the book
about why capitalism’s universalization doesn’t require erasing all social
diversity.

VC: Right. A typical maneuver of postcolonial theorists is
to say something like this: Marxism relies on abstract, universalizing
categories. But for these categories to have traction, reality should look
exactly like the abstract descriptions of capital, of workers, of the state,
etc. But, say the postcolonial theorists, reality is so much more diverse.
Workers wear such colorful clothes; they say prayers while working; capitalists
consult astrologers — this doesn’t look like anything what Marx describes in
Capital. So it must mean that the categories of capital aren’t really
applicable here. The argument ends up being that any departure of concrete reality
from the abstract descriptions of theory is a problem for the theory. But this
is silly beyond words: it means that you can’t have theory. Why should it
matter if capitalists consult astrologers as long as they are driven to make
profits? Similarly, it doesn’t matter if workers pray on the shop floor as long
as they work. This is all that the theory requires. It doesn’t say that
cultural differences will disappear; it says that these differences don’t
matter for the spread of capitalism, as long as agents obey the compulsions
that capitalist structures place on them. I go to considerable lengths to
explain this in the book.

JB: A lot of the appeal of postcolonial theory reflects a
widespread desire to avoid Eurocentrism and to understand the importance of
locally specific cultural categories, forms, identities, and what have you: to
understand people as they were, or are, not just as abstractions. But I wonder
if there’s also a danger with the way they understand the cultural specificity
of non-Western societies, and if that is a form of cultural essentialism.

VC: Absolutely, that is the danger. And it’s not only a
danger; it’s something to which Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory
consistently fall prey. You see it most often in their arguments about social
agency and resistance. It’s perfectly fine to say that people draw on local
cultures and practices when they resist capitalism, or when they resist various
agents of capital. But it’s quite another to say that there are no universal
aspirations, or no universal interests, that people might have.

In fact, one of the things I show in my book is that when
the Subaltern Studies historians do empirical work on peasant resistance, they
show pretty clearly that peasants [in India], when they engage in collective
action, are more or less acting on the same aspirations and the same drives as
Western peasants were. What separates them from the West are the cultural forms
in which these aspirations are expressed, but the aspirations themselves tend
to be pretty consistent.

And when you think about it, is it really outlandish to say
that Indian peasants are anxious to defend their wellbeing; that they don’t
like to be pushed around; that they’d like to be able to meet certain basic
nutritional requirements; that when they give up rents to the landlords they
try to keep as much as they can for themselves because they don’t like to give
up their crops? Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is
actually what these peasant struggles have been about.

When Subalternist theorists put up this gigantic wall
separating East from West, and when they insist that Western agents are not
driven by the same kinds of concerns as Eastern agents, what they’re doing is
endorsing the kind of essentialism that colonial authorities used to justify
their depredations in the nineteenth century. It’s the same kind of
essentialism that American military apologists used when they were bombing
Vietnam or when they were going into the Middle East. Nobody on the Left can be
at ease with these sorts of arguments.

JB: But couldn’t someone respond by saying that you’re
endorsing some form of essentialism by ascribing a common rationality to actors
in very different contexts?

VC: Well, it isn’t exactly essentialism, but I am endorsing
the view that there are some common interests and needs that people have across
cultures. There are some aspects of our human nature that are not culturally
constructed: they are shaped by culture, but not created by it. My view is that
even though there are enormous cultural differences between people in the East
and the West, there’s also a core set of concerns that people have in common,
whether they’re born in Egypt, or India, or Manchester, or New York. These
aren’t many, but we can enumerate at least two or three of them: there’s a
concern for your physical wellbeing; there’s probably a concern for a degree of
autonomy and self-determination; there’s a concern for those practices that
directly pertain to your welfare. This isn’t much, but you’d be amazed how far
it gets you in explaining really important historical transformations.

For two hundred years, anybody who called herself
progressive embraced this kind of universalism. It was simply understood that
the reason workers or peasants could unite across national boundaries is
because they shared certain material interests. This is now being called into
question by subaltern studies, and it’s quite remarkable that so many people on
the Left have accepted it. It’s even more remarkable that it’s still accepted
when over the last fifteen or twenty years we’ve seen global movements across
cultures and national boundaries against neoliberalism, against capitalism. Yet
in the university, to dare to say that people share common concerns across cultures
is somehow seen as being Eurocentric. This shows how far the political and
intellectual culture has fallen in the last twenty years.

JB: If you’re arguing that capitalism doesn’t require
bourgeois liberalism, and that the bourgeoisie didn’t play the historical role
of leading this popular struggle for democracy in the West, how do you explain
the fact that we did get liberalism and democracy in the West, and we didn’t
get those outcomes in the same way in a lot of the postcolonial world?

VC: That’s a great question. The interesting thing is that
when Guha wrote his original essay announcing the agenda of subaltern studies,
he ascribed the failure of liberalism in the East to the failure of its
bourgeoisie. But he also suggested that there was another historical
possibility, namely that the independence movement in India and other colonial
countries might have been led by popular classes, which might have pushed
things in a different direction and perhaps created a different kind of
political order. He brings this up and then he forgets it, and it’s never
brought up again in any of his work.

This is the road that, if he had taken it — and if he had
taken it more seriously — could have led him to a more accurate understanding
of what happened in the West and not just in the East. The fact is that in the
West, when a consensual, democratic, encompassing order did finally slowly
emerge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not a gift
bestowed by capitalists. It was in fact a product of very long, concerted
struggles on the part of workers, farmers, and peasants. In other words, it was
brought forth by struggles from below.

Guha and the Subalternists miss this entirely, because they
insist that the rise of the liberal order was an achievement of capitalists.
Because they misdescribe it in the West, they misdiagnose its failure in the
East. In the East, they wrongly ascribe its failure to the shortcomings of the
bourgeoisie.

Now, if you want an accurate historical research project
explaining the tenuousness of democratic institutions in the East and their
veering towards authoritarianism, the answer does not have to do with the
shortcomings of the bourgeoisie, but with the weakness of the labor movement
and peasant organizations, and with the parties representing these classes. The
weakness of these political forces in bringing some sort of discipline to the
capitalist class is the answer the question subaltern studies poses. That
question is: “Why are the political cultures in the Global South so different
from the Global North?” This is where they ought to be looking: at the dynamics
of popular organizations and the parties of popular organizations; not at some
putative failure of the capitalist class, which in the East was no more
oligarchic and authoritarian than it had been in the West.

JB: You’re obviously very critical of postcolonial theory.
But isn’t there something valid and valuable in its indictment of the
postcolonial order?

VC: Yeah, there’s some value, especially if you look at
Guha’s work. In all of his work, especially in Dominance Without Hegemony, I
think there’s a very salutatory criticism of and general contempt toward the
powers-that-be in a country like India. And that’s a tremendously positive
alternative to the kind of nationalist historiography that had been in place
for decades in a country like India, in which the leaders of the independence
movement were seen as something akin to saviors. Guha’s insistence that not
only was this leadership not a salvation, but that it was in fact responsible
for so many of the shortcomings of the postcolonial order, is to be lauded and
endorsed.

The problem is not his description of the postcolonial
order; the problem is his diagnosis of where those failings come from and how
they might be fixed. I am entirely on board with Guha’s general attitude toward
the Indian elite and its henchmen. The problem is that his analysis of its
causes is so wrongheaded that it gets in the way of an appropriate response and
criticism of that order.

JB: What about Partha Chatterjee? Doesn’t his work offer a
serious critique of the postcolonial state in India?

VC: Some aspects of it, yes. On a purely descriptive level,
Chatterjee’s work on nationalism, like Guha’s, does show the narrowness of the
nationalist leadership’s concerns, their fidelity to elite interests and their
suspiciousness of popular mobilization. All that is to be lauded.

The problem, again, is with the diagnosis. In Chatterjee’s
case, the failings of the Indian nationalist movement are ascribed to its
leadership having internalized a particular ethos, and this is the ethos and
orientation that comes with modernization and modernism. So for Chatterjee, the
problem with Nehru is that he very quickly adopted a modernizing stance towards
the political economy. In other words, he placed great value on a scientific
approach to industrialization, to rational planning and organization — and
that’s at the heart of why, to Chatterjee, India is locked in a position of
“continued subjection” in the global order.

It’s fine to say that Nehru abided by a narrow set of
interests, but to locate the deep sources of his conservatism in his adoption
of a modernizing, scientific worldview seriously mistakes what the problem is.
If the problem with the postcolonial elite is that they adopted a scientific
and rational worldview, the question arises: how do postcolonial theorists plan
to get out of the current crises — not only economic and political, but also
environmental — if they’re saying that science, objectivity, evidence, concerns
with development, are to be ditched?

Chatterjee has no way out of this. In my view, the problem
with Nehru’s leadership, and with the Indian National Congress’s leadership,
was not that they were scientific and modernizing, but that they linked their
program to the interests of the Indian elites — of the Indian capitalist class,
and the Indian landlord class — and that they abandoned their commitment to
popular mobilization and tried to keep the popular classes under very tight
control.

Chatterjee’s approach, while it has the trappings of a
radical critique, is actually quite conservative, because it locates science
and rationality in the West, and in doing so describes the East much as
colonial ideologues did. It’s also conservative because it leaves us with no
means through which we might construct a more humane and more rational order,
because no matter which way you try to move — whether you try to move out of
capitalism towards socialism, whether you try to humanize capitalism through
some kind of social democracy, whether you try to mitigate environmental
disasters through some more rational use of resources — all of it is going to
require those things which Chaterjee impugns: science, rationality, and
planning of some kind. Locating these as the source of the East’s
marginalization is not only mistaken, I think it’s also quite conservative.

JB: But is there nothing to the critique that postcolonial
theorists make of Marxism, as well as other forms of Western thought rooted in
the Enlightenment; that they’re Eurocentric?

VC: Well, we have to distinguish between two forms of
Eurocentrism: one is kind of neutral and benign, which says that a theory is
Eurocentric insofar as its evidentiary base has come mostly from a study of
Europe. In this sense, of course, all the Western theories we know of up to the
late nineteenth century overwhelmingly drew their evidence and their data from
Europe, because the scholarship and the anthropological and historical
literature on the East was so underdeveloped. In this sense, they were
Eurocentric.

I think this kind of Eurocentrism is natural, though it’s
going to come with all sorts of problems, but it can’t really be indicted. The
most pernicious form of Eurocentrism — the one that postcolonial theorists go
after — is where knowledge based on particular facts about the West is
projected onto the East and might be misleading. Indeed, postcolonial theorists
have indicted Western theorists because they not only illicitly project onto
the East concepts and categories that might be inapplicable; they
systematically ignore evidence that is available and might generate better
theory.

If it’s Eurocentrism of the second kind that we’re talking
about, then there have been elements in the history of Marxist thought that
fall prey to this kind of Eurocentrism. However, if you look at the actual
history of the theory’s development, those instances have been pretty rare.

Since the early twentieth century, I think it’s accurate to
say that Marxism is maybe the only theory of historical change coming out of
Europe that has systematically grappled with the specificity of the East. One
of the most curious facts about subaltern studies and postcolonial theory is
that they ignore this. Starting with the Russian Revolution of 1905 and on to
the Revolution of 1917, then the Chinese Revolution, then the African
decolonization movements, then the guerilla movements in Latin America — all of
these social upheavals generated attempts to grapple with the specificity of
capitalism in countries outside of Europe.

You can rattle off several specific theories that came out
of Marxism that not only addressed the specificity of the East, but explicitly
denied the teleology and the determinism that subaltern studies says is central
to Marxism: Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development, Lenin’s theory
of imperialism, the articulation of modes of production, etc. Every one of
these theories was an acknowledgement that developing societies don’t look like
European societies.

So if you want to score points, you can bring up instances
here and there of some sort of lingering Eurocentrism in Marxism. But if you
look at the balance sheet, not only is the overall score pretty positive, but
if you compare it to the orientalism that subaltern studies has revived, it
seems to me that the more natural framework for understanding the specificity
of the East comes out of Marxism and the Enlightenment tradition, not
postcolonial theory.

The lasting contribution of postcolonial theory — what it
will be known for, in my view, if it is remembered fifty years from now — will
be its revival of cultural essentialism and its acting as an endorsement of
orientalism, rather than being an antidote to it.

JB: All of this begs the question: why has postcolonial
theory gained such prominence in the past few decades? Indeed, why has it been
able to supersede the sorts of ideas you’re defending in your book? Clearly,
postcolonial theory has come to fill a space once occupied by various forms of
Marxist and Marxist-influenced thought, and has especially influenced large
swathes of the Anglophone intellectual left.

VC: In my view, the prominence is strictly for social and
historical reasons; it doesn’t express the value or worth of the theory, and
that’s why I decided to write the book. I think postcolonial theory rose to
prominence for a couple of reasons. One is that after the decline of the labor
movement and the crushing of the Left in the 1970s, there wasn’t going to be
any kind of prominent theory in academia that focused on capitalism, the
working class, or class struggle. Many people have pointed this out: in
university settings, it’s just unrealistic to imagine that any critique of
capitalism from a class perspective is going to have much currency except in
periods when there’s massive social turmoil and social upheaval.

So the interesting question is why there’s any kind of
theory calling itself radical at all, since it’s not a classical anticapitalist
theory. I think this has to do with two things: first, with changes in
universities over the last thirty years or so, in which they’re no longer ivory
towers like they used to be. They’re mass institutions, and these institutions
have been opened up to groups that, historically, were kept outside: racial
minorities, women, immigrants from developing countries. These are all people
who experience various kinds of oppression, but not necessarily class
exploitation. So there is, as it were, a mass base for what we might call
oppression studies, which is a kind of radicalism — and it’s important, and
it’s real. However, it’s not a base that’s very interested in questions of
class struggle or class formation, the kinds of things that Marxists used to
talk about.

Complementing this has been the trajectory of the
intelligentsia. The generation of ’68 didn’t become mainstream as it aged. Some
wanted to keep its moral and ethical commitments to radicalism. But like
everyone else, it too steered away from class-oriented radicalism. So you had a
movement from the bottom, which was a kind of demand for theories focusing on
oppression, and a movement on top, which was among professors offering to
supply theories focusing on oppression. What made them converge wasn’t just a
focus on oppression, but the excision of class oppression and class
exploitation from the story. And postcolonial theory, because of its own
excision of capitalism and class — because it downplays the dynamics of
exploitation — is a very healthy fit.

JB: What do you think about the prospects for postcolonial
theory? Do you expect that it will be eclipsed within the academy and within
the Left anytime soon?

VC: No, I don’t. I don’t think postcolonial theory is in any
danger of being displaced, at least not anytime soon. Academic trends come and
go, not based on the validity of their claims or the value of their
propositions, but because of their relation to the broader social and political
environment. The general disorganization of labor and the Left, which created
the conditions for postcolonial theory to flourish, is still very much in
place. Plus, postcolonial theory now has at least two generations of academics
who have staked their entire careers on it; they have half a dozen journals
dedicated to it; there’s an army of graduate students pursuing research agendas
that come out of it. Their material interests are tied up directly with the
theory’s success.

You can criticize it all you want, but until we get the kind
of movements that buoyed Marxism in the early years after World War I, or in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, you won’t see a change. In fact, what you’ll
see is a pretty swift and vicious response to whatever criticisms might emerge.
My sad, but — I think — realistic prognosis is that it’s going to be around for
quite a while.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.